Software firm SAP is quickly growing its startup following of its big data platform HANA, signing 20 new firms to run production applications on it.

Not only will 20 firms be using SAP’s in-memory database that runs on Amazon’s Web Services cloud, but an additional 153 startups will be joining a partner eco-system program SAP created just six months ago. That’s out of 800 around the world that expressed interest in the program, SAP told IDG news.

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Potentially playing the role in the interest around HANA is an incentive in the form of a $155 million venture fund SAP started. SAP has also been marketing its platform hard to startups in recent months. In July, SAP hosted a startup competition in Waterloo, Ont. that awarded startups with big data ideas access to its HANA platform with training included. Sequentia Environics won for a product that would measure performance of Web content.

HANA accesses data more quickly by storing it in memory.

The big data field has become a hot one for startups. Venture capitalists are showing interest in the area and many businesses are suffering pain from being swamped in data without the right tools to extract intelligence from it. Big data solutions promise to do that by quickly sweeping through unstructured data and structured data alike to pull out nuggets of knowledge that can be used to help make decisions.

Platforms like HANA will give startups the tools they need to build their market-specific solutions and go into business.